The Writer's Life

A Podcast on James Joyce's Ulysses

Welcome to Re:Joyce, Frank Delaney's spirited, smart and satisfying deconstruction of James Joyce's Ulysses, in a five-minute podcast. Here is the Introduction and the first episode, and to your right you'll find the entire archive, working backward from the most recent, and added to each week.

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Jan 24, 2011

Read more: Charlotte Bronte’s relationship with writing had a difficult start ever before she got to “Jane Eyre.” She and her two sisters, Anne, who wrote “Wuthering Heights,” and Emily who wrote “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” had at first to publish under pseudonyms that suggested the authors were men.

Before that, while working as a teacher, Charlotte wrote to the then English poet laureate, Robert Southey, asking if she could make her living as a writer. This is what Southey replied; “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it.” He gave himself credit later for having given “that poor girl” what he called “a dose of cooling admonition.” He wrote this long after the appearance on the scene of Miss J. Austen. With such vision, no wonder he wasn’t much of a poet.

How Charlotte wrote anything seems a miracle rather than a mystery, given the emotional stress she must have suffered; her brother, Branwell, a year younger, died at the age of 31; Emily, two years younger than Charlotte, died at age 30; and Anne, three years younger, died at age 29. No wonder Charlotte recorded one day that she picked up her pen “and, I regret to say, nothing occurred.”